Anyone who has either spent enough time with or read my blog knows: I am a firm believer that changing the world for the better lies in the hands of those at the grassroots. As we each strive to apply basic spiritual principles such as respect and equality and, most importantly, set ourselves on a path of constant study, action, consultation and reflection, we will inevitably advance human civilization towards its noble destiny.

As a woman, and especially as a female who works with junior youth, the principle of the equality of women and men is incredibly important to me. It always shocked me that, as a girl, I wasn’t allowed to be a certain way, and that there were certain things about me that made me, by society’s definition, a lesser female.

It was all the more confusing as the different cultures I was exposed to as a child, a junior youth, and as a youth, were completely different in their definition of what a woman was. Actually, no, not completely different, as all of them agreed that a woman married was inherently better than a woman unmarried. Can you blame me for considering No Doubt’s song “Just a Girl” as my anthem during my tween and teen years?

Working with 11 to 15 year-old has made me appreciate that the landscape before them in this day and age is all the more bewildering. If you spend enough time listening to all the voices that define what being a woman is, you realize that there is no way to really be a woman ; whatever you do, someone will not be happy.

This isn’t to say that things are not already changing, and for the better. One example is that there are more and more females are doing what they want and how they want it; societal definitions and impositions firmly chucked out of the window. Granted, I don’t agree with what they are doing, but the message of empowerment in itself is quite inspiring. One such woman is Lady Gaga. I don’t agree with the way she sexualises herself, but her attitude of being who she is and the way she is channeling it (i.e. to become the voice of the marginalized) is quite inspiring to anyone who feels “different” and disempowered.

Of course we are not all global superstars, and even if we were, it is a good question worth discussing to see how many people would actually get up and make a change. There is also the fact that being a noble human being calls for a certain dignity that most people in the world of the music industry don’t strive to apply. And everyone knows that sustainable, long-term change must come from the grassroots.

So what can each of us do to promote gender equality?

I started by examining my thought processes with regards to gender identity. After all, man’s thought is his reality. I also examined quite thoroughly my speech with regards to the same topic, since our thought is shaped by our words.

I was shocked to realise that what I thought was my thought pattern and speech, which I thought were promoting the equality of men and women, were actually not doing much in that regard. I had become so defensive about being a woman that I would use humour to put down men, cracking jokes such as the oft mentioned “God created man first as a rough draft for his perfect creation, woman”.

Putting others down to bring oneself up doesn’t contribute to solving the problem; consultation with my male friends about gender equality ground to a halt as my defensiveness about my imposed inferiority grew. But striving to change my mindset as well as my speech helped at first to defuse my defensiveness and eventually, created spaces for reflection on how to interact in a way that promotes equality between men and women.

In a previous post on The Power of Humility the linked video of Sheryl Sandberg includes the following statistic: “If a woman and a man work full time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of child care the man does.

So she’s got three jobs or two jobs and he’s got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more?”

This statistic affected me deeply. I thought, “Oh, Negin [my wife] and I are both working; we’re both committed to this idea of equality… But wait — so are most of those couples in the statistic, right? If I look with a detached eye – if I look at our circumstances with justice, might it be the case that Negin is doing 2 or 3 times more housework than I am? And if so, what does that say about the lack of correspondence between my deeds and my words?”

I shared my concern about this with Negin. I told her that if we were going to have a child, this was not the example I wanted to set – saying that I believed in the equality of women and men, but failing to shoulder my share of the work in the household. So the last two weeks, I’ve increased the acts of service I engage in at the household level, and we’ve also begun to reflect on how we conceive of housework differently. One way we have advanced in our understanding is realizing that neither of us enjoy cleaning – we both see it as a chore that we’d rather avoid. However, Negin was taught that she had to clean up before she could do other things – a lesson that I somehow avoided. We’ve learned to not see each other through the lens of a false dichotomy: “You’re the clean one, I’m the messy one,” but instead to see that within each of us lies the capacity to engage in acts of service for the progress of our marriage and our household.

So what do you think? How does thinking about the kinds of work that are recognized as work relate to advancing the equality of women and men? What assumptions underlie the popular notion that women are clean and men are dirty? What spiritual capacities are at work here, and how can they be nurtured?

My particular interest when it comes to promoting gender equality is education and parenting.

It seems to me that there is a natural, though regrettable, human tendency to seek a sense of superiority over others; shockingly, most societies encourage and foster this weakness of the ego. We praise our children for being more than others—more beautiful, cleverer, richer, whiter, skinnier. We teach them to gain a sense of self-worth from out-performing others, rather than to focus on the intrinsic joy of achievement individually and collaboratively. Our schools grade “on the curve”: the grade of “A” means not simply high personal accomplishment, but in fact that one student is, in absolute terms, better than the others. This is the feature of the “Tiger Mom” parenting philosophy, so recently dominating the news, which I found most objectionable: the idea that we should teach our children that their goal is to be “better than everybody else.” When an individual becomes dependent on the relative lowness of others to make him or herself feel higher—whether it be a boy who has been taught that he is better than his sister or a white child who has been taught that she is better than a child of color—it leads to equal dysfunction in the world outside the family.

The Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing body of the Bahá’í Faith, wrote a message on the dynamics of achieving peace in the world that touches on the relationship between sexism and peace. Entitled “The Promise of World Peace,” the document states,

The emancipation of women, the achievement of full equality between the sexes, is one of the most important, though less acknowledged prerequisites of peace. The denial of such equality perpetrates an injustice against one half of the world’s population and promotes in men harmful attitudes and habits that are carried from the family to the workplace, to political life, and ultimately to international relations.(http://info.bahai.org/article-1-7-2-1.html)

This last is a process I’ve seen at play over and over again—the same men who treat the women and children in their lives in the worst ways also behave badly in larger society. It is as though this ingrained idea of their own superiority, learned in childhood and never successfully challenged or uprooted in their character, engenders a sort of irrational belief in their right to treat all other humans as chattel. Ordinary men run corrupt businesses, wage endless lawsuits, abuse their children and underlings or break the law. Tyrants and despots take it to another level. That sense of personal superiority, of a sort of god-like status, brings with it an imaginary golden passport to all kinds of exploitation of other people—the satisfaction of personal lusts, impulsive and/or calculated violence without any consequences, thievery, international aggression, and boundless self-aggrandizement. (It’s no coincidence that despotic regimes always feature the image of the dictator prominently in every public space and even require its adoration in people’s homes.)

So, what can we do differently? Somehow, individually and collectively, we need to change our tune, start teaching ourselves and our children that what matters is not how you compare to the guy next to you, but how you compare to your own potential. Our self-worth must arise from service and virtue, not the spiritual illness of imagined superiority over others. Even believing this so strongly, I’ve found it a struggle to remember NOT to laud my daughter for being smart or doing something easily and quickly, but instead to praise and reward her for working hard, doing her best, collaborating, caring about others and trying to do good things in the world. We can demand these standards in our schools; if we are scholars we can conduct the research needed to convince others that here’s how we can improve education; if we are teaching in religious schools we can recognize that this is integral to the development of a spiritual identity.

At the end of the day, gender equality is linked to all other equalities and the way we educate our kids is key.

Welcome

At the core of this blog is the document “Advancing towards the Equality between Women and Men” prepared by the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity. However, engendering equality is not just a catchy name, it’s also a process we are all engaged in. In order to give us inspiration to be working towards engendering equality this blog tries to create a space in which actions and reflections are shared by individuals on the promotion of the equality of women and men within their social space.